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Mobile and Retail: Dream a Little More, Worry a Little Less and Analyze Everything

October 27, 2015 — by MediaMath    

Since the very beginning of mobile marketing (not that long ago, all things considered) there were really two camps. For the sake of this article, let’s say that there are the dreamers and the worriers. The dreamers are overcommitted and too focused on one particular solution. The worriers are so concerned about one tiny element not working that they ignore the whole channel (think about sites that are still not mobile-optimized as an example). This dynamic has hurt the growth of mobile advertising. However, there are ways to remedy the struggles inherent in each group after you assess into which camp you fall.

The Dreamers

Dreamers see mobile as solving everything. You hear this scenario time and time again. A consumer is walking down the street and receives either a push message, a text or a targeted ad for the store they are near, given an incentive to come in and rewarded at point of purchase. There are a thousand variations, but it always boils down to some sort of combination of right place, right time, right message, right format. Mobile will deliver—just implement my piece of the technology puzzle and you will get results.

The Worriers

The second scenario is the worrier. This group of marketers lives in perpetual fear of disrupting the consumer experience. Who wants to be bombarded by texts when walking by stores, or spam phone calls or pop-up ads on such a personal device? Privacy, liability and user experience concerns dominate this crowd.

So what does mobile advertising and marketing really mean for a retailer? The answer is going be different for each scenario, and this is the key to understanding mobile in general. Mobile is a huge channel that needs to simultaneously be both broken into digestible chunks and retied for a seamless experience. This means that retailers need to do three key things in every campaign.

1. Set objectives for each effort. If you want to drive floor traffic for an event, focus your efforts on doing that and measure, measure, measure. There are a lot of ways of accomplishing this goal, from SMS to targeted ads to in-app takeovers. On the other hand, if the objective is in-store optimization, think beacons and other hyper local techniques. This is the easy part.

Retailer takeaway: Tie campaigns to actual goals in a very literal way. You can measure actual sales with simple integrations into POS systems or even by hand at time of sale or with follow-ups. By understanding what pieces of your mobile campaign are in sync with consumer behavior, it is easy not only to optimize but also to measure true ROI.

2. Lead with utility. Results in mobile are mainly driven by utility. Generally speaking, when one is on the phone either surfing, using an app or texting, the experience is very focused and goal-oriented. I am checking the price, comparing, brands, communicating a sentiment or something of that ilk. In every scenario, an untargeted ad or irrelevant message disrupts, annoys and is ultimately ineffective.

Retailer take-away: Do your homework and target your audience very carefully. A smaller, well-targeted audience might cost more upfront, but a relevant message will pay for itself many times over. But even more than the audience, consider the context. Your message should provide simple utility that can be acted upon in the channel for which it is delivered. For example, don’t ask people to print coupons from their phones.

3. Be prepared to be wrong and learn. This is the harder part. Use the data to continually iterate and improve. Sometimes the best results come from outlier behavior or components of a campaign, a referral program at the bottom of an offer, a hang tag with a QR code, or maybe mobile driving web sales of different products showcased on a homepage.

Retailer takeaway: Create a customer experience based on actual behavior, location and timing by fitting together all these pieces of your data. In other words, do my ads inform my SMS and am I tying this all back to actual sales?

Accomplishing these three things will require you to see mobile as a piece of a larger effort and sometimes the very thing that can turn shoppers into buyers.

In the end, if you can bring the smaller technology-driven efforts together into a larger picture, you can afford to dream a little more and worry a little less.

Learn more about MediaMath Retail here.